Eduwatch: NIB Involvement In WASSCE Reduced Leakages
Africa Education Watch (Eduwatch) has reported the involvement of the National Intelligence Bureau (NIB) in the 2022 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) minimised the rate of examination leakages.
In September while the exam was ongoing, the West African Examination Council (WAEC) said it had collaborated with the NIB to monitor the printing of the examination papers.
This was reported in the education think tank’s report on the 2022 WASSCE which was launched on October 27, 2022.
According to the report, their involvement was “highly impactful” on the questions’ security.
That notwithstanding, the CSO says Elective Mathematics 2 and Core Mathematics 2 question papers leaked nine (9) hours before their scheduled time to be written.
In a related development, the report of Eduwatch found that centre fraud was on the rise.
“There were reports of cash collection between GHC 300 to GHC 3,000 from candidates by some school authorities in return for supervised cheating. In some schools, questions were solved and transmitted through WhatsApp platforms or written on whiteboards for candidates to copy during the exams.
“Specific ‘stongrooms’ were designated by some school authorities for solving the questions before transmitting to students.”
422, 883 candidates from 977 schools sat for 60 subjects at 775 centres in this year’s WASSCE.
Among the measures the Council said it adopted in dealing with exam fraud included working with security agencies to track and arrest persons operating rogue websites; inspection and upgrade of depots nationwide; serialisation of some question papers; and movement of exam papers from strong rooms to depots in batches.
It also said it created additional depots near schools to avoid delay; uses number-combination padlocks in addition to padlocks for security bags containing exam papers; issues question papers 45 minutes before scheduled time; inspects and surveys malpractice-prone centres; and name and shame schools engaged in malpractices.
On September 16, the Council published the names of 34 different Senior High Schools (SHS) caught in Examination malpractices such as smuggling of mobile phones into exam halls, impersonation, syndicate cheating, inside-exam hall malpractice, deployment of various cheating tactics, and restriction of WAEC agents from accessing schools.
“The schools have been cautioned that their school/centre would be derecognised if the malpractices were recorded in those places during the examination. Two schools ie. Great Dafco and Supreme SHS were relocated to WAEC Hall, Kumasi to continue with their papers”, the Council said.
As part of Eduwatch’s recommendations, it said the Ministry of Education and Parliament should support an amendment of the WAEC Act (Act 719) to criminalise the various new types of examination fraud.
Source: opemsuo.com/Hajara Fuseini
